Moving on to the non-quantifible part. I think this is interesting because it's not at all unique to Urbs. Fans across the country assume their coach loves their not great QB to a fault. It's pretty common. At a point, we must ask, are all these coaches watching hours of practice films and misjudging all of it (maybe), or are fans by and large built to believe what they've hardly seen is better than what they often see? This is not to say it's 100 percent one way or the other, only that this common feeling might be endemic in the kind of optimism we see in ourselves.
Agreed... We were seeing it just this year with Sindelar at Purdue, especially after Brohm seemed to prefer Sindelar to Blough two years in a row, only to see Blough take the reins strongly when he got the starter role.
But even this year, there were people thinking that Sindelar was never going to be worthwhile and that Brohm should just start developing Plummer. Might as well build for the future, right?
And of course we see what happens. Plummer comes in and has games he looks great [not that this is hard against Maryland], and games [Illinois] where he's benched for a walk-on because he looks terrible. Not that I agreed with the decision to bench him, but he DID look terrible.
I find it hard to believe that all these coaches are so doe-eyed in love with a certain QB that they lose all objectivity.
That said, I do think that some of the coaches tend to be very risk-averse. They worry that if they bench the starter and the backup fails, they get the blame. But if they stick with the starter, nobody knows whether the backup would have succeeded in their place, so nobody has in-game evidence on which to base their criticism.
This is somewhat changing with the transfer portal, as we see in this thread. Guys who would have been career backups--even if they might be better than the starter--now jump ship and go to other schools. If they flourish at the other school, the coach who had them riding pine looks wrong. But I think that's flawed logic. When you jump from one offensive system, offensive coordinator, blocking scheme/talent, RB/receiving talent, etc to another, on top of changes to culture, changes to team chemistry, etc... It's not apples-to-apples.
But I agree... Fans always seem to think they know more than the coach in calling for the backup QB, and in some cases, maybe they're right. In a lot of cases, however, they're working on such incomplete information relative to the coaching staff that they're probably only right about twice a day.
